Tag: President Trump

In sworn testimony before Congress yesterday, Michael Cohen former attorney dubbed “Donald Trump’s fixer” called his former boss, President Trump, a conman and racist.

To back up his claims that the President is a racist, Cohen recalled a statement Trump made about Black Chicago residents.

“While we were once driving through a struggling neighborhood in Chicago, he commented that only Black people could live that way,” Cohen said in a prepared statement before the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

“And he told me that Black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid,” Cohen added. “And yet I continued to work for him.”

Cohen recalled other incidents in his prepared statement.

“Mr. Trump is a racist,” he said. “The country has seen Mr. Trump court white supremacists and bigots. You have heard him call poorer countries ‘shitholes.’ In private, he is even worse.

“He once asked me if I could name a country run by a Black person that wasn’t a ‘shithole,'” Cohen said. “This was when Barack Obama was president of the United States.”

House Republicans attacked Cohen who was convicted last year of lying to Congress about a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen testified on Wednesday that he lied to protect Mr. Trump.

Wednesday was day 2 of three consecutive days of congressional appearances for Cohen. The disbarred former lawyer will appear before the House Intelligence Committee where he will speak in private on Thursday.

President Trump waited until Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other high ranking Democrats boarded a bus to the airport to inform them that their 7-day excursion to Europe, Africa and the Middle East was cancelled.

Pelosi and about two dozen lawmakers sat fuming on an Air Force bus while aides frantically called the Pentagon and White House to confirm their trip had really been canceled.

Witnesses say the bus circled the Capitol building several times before it finally pulled up to the Capitol and let the passengers off. Military officers carried Pelosi’s baggage back inside the Capitol building and left them on a cart in the hallway outside her office.

The spat between Trump and Pelosi began when she tried to cancel his State of the Union Address on Thursday. She claimed the President couldn’t speak to the nation because there weren’t enough Secret Service agents during the shutdown. But the Secret Service disputed her claim.

In a letter to Pelosi on Thursday, Trump canceled Pelosi’s publicly unannounced trip, saying 800,000 workers were not being paid, so she needed to stay home to negotiate the funding of the border wall to end the shutdown.

Petty Trump told Pelosi she could still fly to Europe – on a commercial airliner if she insist.

While I agree with what the President addressed in his letter, the fact that such a letter was issued and then made public with a misspelling is unprofessional. It also speaks to the level of individuals he has working in his administration.

This is President Trump’s shutdown because Pelosi is not going to fund a 5 billion dollar wall on the U.S. tax payers dime. Furthermore Trump need to check his facts, immigrants and drug smugglers are crossing the border into the U.S. not by a border wall.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) blames former President Barack Obama for the racial divide in America that helped sway voters to elect Donald Trump by a landslide. Santorum said Obama could have brought the country together but instead he increased racism in part by his response to police shootings.

Santorum made the accusations during a heated State of the Union panel discussion about racism on CNN Sunday.

The panel discussed a new book written by a former Obama adviser who quoted Obama as saying “What if we were wrong” about what the American people wanted from a president. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

Karine Jean-Pierre, a senior adviser and national spokeswoman for MoveOn.org, said it was “pretty horrific” to see voters rally behind Trump during the 2016 election.

“There was an uproar. You saw the Tea Party. You saw obstruction by Republicans time and time again,” Jean-Pierre said. “It is kind of problematic. It says a lot about this country, and Donald Trump tapped into it.”

Santorum added that Obama played a part in increasing racism that helped elect Trump to office.

“What’s being ignored here is the role that Barack Obama played in all this,” Santorum said. “You can’t just go from ‘well, we elected our first black president’ and ‘all of a sudden we get Donald Trump.’ There was something in between those two things.”

“Every time there was a controversy with someone of color involved, he took the side, many times, against the police,” Santorum said. “He did it over and over and over again.”

Santorum added that Obama was “someone who could’ve brought this country together” but failed to do so.

Jean-Pierre, who sat beside Santorum on the panel, defended Obama, saying the few instances when Obama did speak up after police shootings he was standing up for people who had been unjustifiably treated.

She asked Santorum if he was referring to the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012, but time was running out and the panel discussion ended.

Without much fanfare (totally apropos, given what’s been happening in the world of the White House in the last 72 hours), President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday that will force recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, Medicaid and low-income housing subsidies to find work or lose their assistance.

Trump quietly signed the long-anticipated order, oddly named “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility.” Given that many government agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, have already begun issuing waivers to Republican governors who want to impose stricter work requirements on Medicaid recipients to cut costs, it will not make much of an impact, according to the New York Times.

The fact remains that most able-bodied adults who receive federal aid in the form of subsidized health care or housing already work—but are still unable to make ends meet; others receive exemptions for legitimate reasons.

Trump also reportedly wants to change the word “welfare” to include not only cash payments but also food and medical benefits (SNAP and Medicaid).

Or he just doesn’t give AF. And I quote: “Mr. Trump, several aides said, is unconcerned—or perhaps even unaware—of the distinction between cash assistance and other safety-net programs … he calls them all welfare.”

President Trump has no clue of how average Americans live, nor is he privy or empathetic to the everyday challenges of an average family. For those who have been riding the system for years, the president’s goal is to trim the fat, cut the gravy and stop the train.